Nazim Hikmet – A World Poet

Sennur Sezer

Nazim Hikmet is a ‘world poet’. Many have asked why he is referred to in
these terms. He has been mocked, belittled and accused – all because of this
term. Questions of this type have generally been put by military prosecutors or
judges. They were also asked at Selimiye Barracks in Istanbul (where
interrogations took place after the 1980 military coup). They were fired at the
leaders of the Union of Turkish Writers. But no organisation, no political view
can make a poet look greater than he is. First of all it would lack conviction.
When we say that Nazim Hikmet is a world poet, we receive international
approval. Thus, we must investigate the qualities that make him a ‘world poet’.

‘Nazim Hikmet is a world poet because he wanted all the
people of the world to live in freedom and happiness; that is what he fought
for.’

This is a correct but incomplete answer. Only a small number of the poets who
shared Nazim Hikmet’s view of the world, who represented the same ideals,
deserve this title. One of them is Pablo Neruda. A poet’s view of the world is
important, but it is insufficient for him to become a ‘world poet’.

‘Nazim Hikmet is a world poet because he spoke of the
yearnings of people in all geographies, not about what the art of poetry had
until then taken such pains to describe.’

This answer is also correct, but at the same time it prompts the question of
how. How did he speak of these things so that readers of Turkish poetry were
moved, felt the need to learn his poems by heart and copy them out? Why is it
that readers of the poems in translation are unable to forget them, although the
possibilities of the original language, its poetic qualities have been lost?

Nazim Hikmet’s poetry is characterised by visions and words that come from
living – from life itself. A person’s ‘love of living’ (joie de
vivre), the worker suffering from lack of sleep, the sadness of being unable
to give even a flower to one’s beloved are all expressed together with the
conviction that better days are to come. There is imprisonment, falling in love,
deception, unemployment, loving one’s country so much that one can see it in a
much-loved face, a puff of cigarette smoke, even a shirt; admiration of a
cucumber because of its smell, its freshness and colour; there is understanding
of the sensitivities and feelings in a worker’s hand. There is the ability to
be convincing in every line of the poem. An example of this is the statement
that children should not be killed, that they have the right to eat sweets. It
is seen in the sharpness with which he describes a youth maimed by the atom
bomb, in the mockery with which he refers to conceit. Is it his simplicity of
narration that makes him a world poet?

The answer to this question is ‘yes’. If you work for a living, you know
that his voice speaks for you as well. It is because Nazim Hikmet’s voice
never lies, for it states unhesitatingly that its owner has never tilled the
soil. It is because he feels that no person should fear another person. It is
because even though he accepted death and defeat with his mind, he never
accepted them with his heart. It is because he was able to create a feeling of
‘oneness’ similar to that existing between a driver and his car, a rider and
his horse.

Nazim Hikmet is a poet who describes the conflict between labour and capital,
the dreams of workers, a poet who tells us how the world would change if the
money spent on armaments were spent on meeting other needs.

He reflects this situation just like all the truths he describes, together
with the situations in the ‘yesterday-today-future’ tenses and their
changing aspects. He narrated his epics with structures as mobile as changes in
time and place, flashbacks and flashes forward in a film script.

Let us remember The Epic of Sheikh Bedrettin, Son of the Qadi of
Simavna, Human Landscapes from my Country, and Straw Yellow.

I consider it would be no exaggeration to say that these poems are a major
contribution to world literature.

I feel we can perhaps explain Nazim Hikmet’s status as a world poet by the
fact that his poetry is expressed in cries –statements – above distinctions
of class, culture and religion. Whatever it is that enables lines such as ‘They
took me out into the sun for the first time today’, ‘Dead children do not
grow’ and ‘Children can die just like bearded soldiers’ to be translated
and read all over the world – this is the quality which makes Nazim Hikmet a
world poet. A poet who acted in defence of life.